Man, I love me some space battle deck builders. But wait, didn't I play this one before? A while ago, while it was in early access, very fun game. So many neat ideas packed into one, various different ways to attack, and stack up damages while surviving each rounds.
Playing as a bounty hunter in Lonestar is a pretty hectic job. I have to deal with brainwashed maniacs, junk obsessed goons, rogue A.I.s, and many of the power tripping hostile forces who thinks they can stack up better than me. The gameplay loop is fun, kind of like FTL, it's pretty easy to get into, and things to find like backstories and unique characters to unlock.
I get my own personal trainer, who guides me around and provides tips, other than that, pretty much nothing else like you know, buffs and such. I start off with a weight class of 6, meaning I can only install 6 attack and support units for my ship. With three lanes for attacks.
Simple, straightforward, I start off my first battle with an enemy that has more health than my units seemingly could dish out damage. It's a petite system at first, but after taking out my first four bounties, with the last being a boss, I've increased weight, saved up star points, and well, the tricky part starts to rear its ugly head. It's a lottery game for finding both energy and rarer units.
Everything factors, from the energy resources and number counts, slots for each attack units, overpowering, and using support units to boost up the damages. It's like doing Algebra, but you have to slot specific cards into certain slots. White slots can have all white, blue, and orange energy cards. Blue cannot be slotted white, and orange specifically for orange.
You have to find a way to put the math to practice and make use to dish out as much damage as possible. You have to dish out more damage than their planned attacks each turn, doing so takes their armor down. At 0, they become paralyzed for the entire turn, leaving them vulnerable.
A session has 4 battles, but this entire run consists of 12 total battles, with 3 bosses. Your units get rarer and stronger, and at max weight 9, you get to go buckwild with everything you've unlocked. That's the other crazy part, how you've obtained them. It's never simple, the RNG works in surprising ways, either benefitting me or just not working to my interests. Sometimes I have to learn hard ways to even make the best use of whatever works in combo.
But where did the real challenge lie? Well, definitely not in the first run, this was easy to play, and felt like a tutorial to set up for how to play later on. I had to learn how important in having shield is, the crazier difficult enemies get solely based on how they can stack up damage.
Having treasures that would give me certain bonuses like extra energy cards, shield regeneration, strength boosts, etc., are very essential. In every battle, I'd had vacation days, and pick options for finding things. Sometimes I'd get the choice of even upgrading my units. Which wasn't entirely possible in the early versions. Farming star points isn't hard, so I went carte blanche.
After defeating my first run, I finally get a choice of picking multiple new characters for bonuses. My cat guy is so helpful with rewards, upgrading units and farming for star points. The only caveat is that some time in-game story plays out parts where he gets discriminated on.
Even better, the difficulty ramped up. Enemies own units are crazier, they can mirror energy units like mine, deflect, cancel out, and even switch lanes while combining stupidly high damage numbers. I can use fuel to move my ship out of the attack zone, but with limited use, we got a whole heap of other issues. Moving the ship also limits my ship's ability to break their shields.
My cat guy can only help out so far, because dear god, I've tried adding more to my energy stack, not realizing later game that opportunity never shows up, and I'm stuck with having to scrounge around for good treasures and stronger units. I kid you not when I say, it's good fun trying to find loopholes, restarting the battle before I reach defeat, and stack up damage better.
By the end, I had 5 legendary attack units, increasing strength with the others, support that adds strength once I overpower by adding cards meeting or exceeding their energy requirement. Even drawing higher card counts inserting their color types.
The last battle, final one is this boss that basically copies all my energy for white, blue, and green, and by the third turn, after copying done, it locks the rest of my cards out. I have pulled my hair to beat this guy up, and I'm out of options. Leaving me only to abandon and redo the run. I have no problem with that, each run lasts mostly around 1-2hrs. It's not as critically challenging and bulk in content as other games, but I can say that it's like something you leave in your Steam Deck.
